I'm all for cable competition, and I am no fan of Comcast. Maybe if AT&T gets into the cable TV business, Comcast will have to try a little harder to make its gear work and provide better service.
But I'm a little dubious about this deal to let AT&T put 726 new metal boxes on the street. And I have to say: Concluding, as the City Planning Department did, that there's no need for an environmental impact report, is a bit of a stretch.
Comcast, for all its problems, has most of its equipment undergound. That's a better option. I'm not quite as offended by the sight of boxes on the street as San Francisco Beautiful is (hey -- why not ask local artists to paint cool stuff on them? Turn them into street art instead of ugly metal contraptions covered with graffiti) but there's a larger point here: AT&T is about to get a huge amount of public sidewalk space -- essentially free.
Do the math: 726 boxes, each one taking up eight square feet of sidewalk space. That's 5,808 square feet of prime real estate in one of the most dense, congested cities in the country. You know what it would cost to lease that space in a storefront downtown? Well, you can look here and here and you get an idea -- that kind of space is worth at least $15,000 a month, maybe a lot more.
And AT&T says it has another 1,200 existing boxes on the street.
Why are we giving this public space away to a giant corporation? I'm getting sick of seeing all this money left on the table -- Twitter gets a tax break, PG&E has a crazy-low franchise fee, the garbage company has no franchise fee at all ... it's like we've become Corporate Giveaway City.
The issue coming before the supervisors at 4 p.m. April 26th is whether the city should force AT&T to do an environmental impact report. AT&T hates that idea -- because if the company has to do an EIR here, it will have to do an EIR in every other city in California before it installs above-ground cable boxes. And it seems like SF Beautiful has a good argument in favor of the EIR.
But the supervisors should go further: Why not open up the AT&T franchise agreement and charge more for the new boxes? Then at least the city will get some cash out of this.